Less is More

“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” – Michael Porter

“Strategy” is one of the oldest buzzwords in business. People throw around terms like “strategic planning” or “strategy development” or “strategic thinking” on a regular basis. For most people, all those terms conjure up an image of people sitting around a conference table doing seem deep thinking and discussing world-changing issues.

One of the problems with strategy in most organizations is that there really isn’t any. There is simply a never-ending string of reactions to crisis situations. Every day, something happens (usually several somethings) that isn’t exactly what we wanted, and we spend the rest of the day fixing it. Then we get up the next day and do it again.

At best, too many leaders who actually devote some time to “strategic planning” end up just making a to-do list of short-term, tactical things. It’s hard to blame them for that. We’re so used to being down in the details and just handling day-to-day problems that it’s really difficult to step back and think big picture or look into the future.

Even in the rare occasion that we do it, we still have a tendency to come out of any strategic planning session with more things to do. In fact, I’ve been involved in strategic planning sessions where the success of the session seemed to be measured by the number of new tasks that were assigned.

The problem is that everybody was already busy. If we just keep piling on more the new stuff won’t get done, or at least won’t get done very well. We have to think about what we’re going to stop doing or we’ll never make any progress.

Think about your business. What takes energy away from what’s most important? Can you stop doing that? What things are you doing that add no value for your customers? Why are you doing those things? What things will your customers value in 3-5 years? And what things do your customers no longer value that they thought were important 20 years ago?

Those are hard questions, and you can’t answer them in a 30-minute leadership team meeting. So, they stay unanswered, and we just keep on putting out fires. If you’re the leader, you have a responsibility to break that cycle. You have a responsibility to emphasize the importance of thinking strategically. Most leaders don’t do that very well. Start doing better today.